From In These Times: Islam Needs Radicals by Mark Levine gets at some of the label issues I have been wrestling with for a while now. Radical, Left, Right, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Traditional, Reformer, Extremist, Fundamentalist. All these labels have their nuances and they all mean different things and answer different questions: Do you follow traditional scholarship or do you try to re-interpret the source texts apart from tradition? Should Islam accomodate itself to the larger secular society or the other way around? What is your attitude towards American foreign policy? What is your attitude towards wealth and political power in general? Do you tend to read the texts literally or figuratively? Do you tend to read the texts in ways which restrict conduct/behavior or are permissive?
It is common to find Western commentary on Islam which seems to assume that there are two camps; "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims" who can be easily distinguished based on their answers to the above questions. But on the contrary, these questions actually outline a multidimensional space where for almost any given combination of answers one could probably find a group which espouses that particular combination.
Past Grenada entries on related subjects:
take a step to the left
progressive islam?
the spiritual left
what is progressive islam?
lily munir on indonesian islamic liberation theology
tariq ramadan and globalization
muslim anarchism
how progressive is the progressive muslim movement?
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